October 19, 2009 - Baratunde Cola, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, was awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award. He will use the $300,000 grant to support his project entitled, "Photothermal Enhanced Carbon Nanotube Rectenna Arrays for Solar Energy Conversion." CMDITR extends heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Cola, who is in his first year with the STC.
Dr. Baratunde Cola joined Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in April of 2009. He received his B.E (2002) and M.S. (2004) from Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. (2008) from Purdue University, all in mechanical engineering. At Purdue, he was honored with an Intel Foundation Fellowship, a Purdue Doctoral Fellowship, and a NASA Institute of Nanoelectronics and Computing Fellowship. He was also the recipient of Purdue's College of Engineering “Top Dissertation Award” for his research on photoacoustic characterization of carbon nanotube (CNT) array thermal interfaces. Dr. Cola worked as a test and development research engineer at Intel during the summer of 2007, and he was a visiting scholar at UT Dallas NanoTech Institute from January 2009 until the start of his appointment at Tech. His current research is focused on fabricating and exploring the properties of nanostructured surfaces and interfaces to enhance energy transport and conversion, improve heat transfer characteristics, and enable MEMS and nanotechnology devices.
The DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) program identifies and engages rising research stars in junior faculty positions in academia and exposes them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs and DARPA's program development process. The YFA program provides high-impact funding to these rising stars early in their careers in order to develop their research ideas in the context of DoD needs. The long term goal is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in key disciplines who will focus a significant portion of their career on DoD and National Security issues.